An Online Blog Dedicated to Hobbyists and Light Industrial Users, and Potential Users, of Desktop 3D Printing and Fabricating Solutions.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

The STL File. One way to get there from here.

It's one thing to have a 3D printer; but, it's not very useful unless you can send your part or masterpiece to it reliably. With so many different 3D formats being used somebody had to come up with an open standard that could be used as the common language between 3D modeling applications and the 3D printer.

While the software that drives some of the 3D printers are able to interpret .OBJ files, all of them, to the best of our knowledge, understand the .STL file format.

We recently found an excellent article on the STL file format that covers the topic in very clear terms.

We were surprised to learn that the file format goes back to 1987. And, the company that released it was 3D systems, the makers of the V-Flash Desktop 3D Printer! STL stands for STereoLithography. It's generally written as a text file; but, there is also a binary version.